Damn, Nancy Drew gets whipped by the Nazis.
Ok, not exactly but it almost feels like it when the character played by
Bonita Granville is. Granville had starred in the four film Nancy Drew series.
Made in the middle of WW2, this is your basic propaganda film about the evils
of Nazi Germany - but perhaps unknown to the filmmakers they
barely scratched the surface of their evil. No concentration camps, no dragging
the Jews out of their homes and putting them on trains, no wholesale slaughter
and digging mass graves for them - but it hits on a few points - the mass
belief in Hitler, the brainwashing of the children, the fear of those who
don't comply, the singling out of Jews, Poles, the sterilization of women
who were not Aryan enough and the murder of those who refuse to bend. This
was produced by RKO, directed by Edward Dmytryk and it was a big hit.
The filmmakers condense all this down to a small story of three people. It
begins in the early 1930s and an American school sits opposite the Horst
Wessel school for aspiring young Nazi thugs. Horst Wessel was a Storm Trooper
killed in 1930 and made into a martyr and the song he wrote became known
as Horst Wessel and became the National Anthem of Germany. For some reason,
the Nazi students keep getting into rumbles with the American students and
one of the Nazi students Karl (Western star Tim Holt) falls for German born
but American citizen Anna (Bonita). They flirt, go off on picnics with the
American teacher played by Kent Smith (Cat People and Curse of the Cat People)
chaperoning.
Years pass, Germany starts on its road to conquering Europe and Karl goes
away. He returns eventually to the American school as your friendly neighborhood
Gestapo agent and takes Anna away and puts her in a Camp to learn to be a
good German and at some point to have fine Nazi children. Even though an
American citizen she is of German blood and you know the old saying, blood
into blood. It sort of goes where you think it might but then not exactly
which gives the film an added punch. Playing the Nazis are Otto Kruger and
Hans Conried, playing a sympathetic German, afraid his own children might
turn him in, is Lloyd Corrigan and the German preacher who stands up to Hitlerism
is H.B. Warner. All these WW2 propaganda films have an element of corniness
to them now some 75 years later and this certainly has that - but it is easy
to understand why it was effective back then.
